the music of ambient loop guitarist dave stafford and the pureambient microlabel

the music of the moment (and the music of the past)

work on the backlog of audio continues, I’ve actually made some pretty good progress on several different fronts, unfortunately, not so much progress on others, but there is a lot of music beginning to emerge:

from january 2nd, 2012 session, I’ve now mastered the final version of “signs of winter” and after a lot of trials and tribulations, the video has been rendered and uploaded and is available for your watching/listening pleasure now. this is one of the longest version of this improv, and it’s really a good one, it has a really long and very cool animoog intro, and a great looped and live strings session following – this might be my favourite of all the versions of this song so far. I’m also happy that this session is now complete, because that means I can move on to assessing newer sessions – so that is exciting, too!

I am continuing to work on recovering a set of animoog audio-only recordings that fell prey to the overloaded IRQ-created pops and clicks, and I de-clicked and de-popped the first seven of twenty tracks, and it looks like at least two of those seven are “takes” – and just hearing these again, and hearing them without pops, the animoog is a very, very capable synth with some great, great presets, but it’s ability to customise that I am looking forward to – creating variants of presets that sound even better/stranger, it’s hugely fun to play with, and then of course full x-y pad capability, so I can alter as I play too…love that instrument! so – fourteen more to clean up, using adobe audition, I don’t quite know what I am going to “do” with these tracks, perhaps some of them might be suitable for the orsi-stafford album, and/or, part of yet-another-unplanned-but-there-it-is album of synth music by yours truly. the last track I did, which happened to be track 19, had the most amazing tone, it sounded kind of like a modified, textured motorcycle, but the resulting track just sounds fantastic – I love the sound of the animoog, it’s such a nice synth!

I also mastered a 45-minute session by holding stafford & corriere, from 1977, and it was fascinating to look back at this session, made when prog rock was at it’s height, and hearing myself as a 19-year old prog guitarist wannabe is a strange experience now. when I hear those three 19 year old men play, I see a big prog future for them, but the reality was even stranger, ted holding went on to play in pop / top 40 bands, I went into prog briefly but then took a sharp detour to crafty acoustic/ambient/ebow/looping and never really got back into prog until the last ten years or so… and I have no idea where our drummer, rick, ended up – the last time I saw him was at an allan holdsworth concert in san diego.

it’s exciting hearing these improvised pieces again, I really enjoyed mastering this tape, especially because I had the very powerful hum, hiss and noise reduction capabilities of adobe audition to help me – something you will always need with a tape of this age. I was able to make the performances sound as good as they can, I am very thankful indeed that ted holding did such a great job of miking up the session, with his carefully-placed stereo drum mikes on rick’s kit – everything sounded great, but with the help of the clean up audio tools in audition, and the mixing tools in SONAR, I think this is one of the best efforts so far as far as cleaning audio for the pureambient blog audio companion page.

the tracks went up this past saturday, a week ago today, so I hope you’ll have a chance to download and listen to this improvised session, it’s forty minutes plus of great prog rock, performed live in the studio by yours truly and my two best junior high school pals – it’s a fun session, but it’s also a serious stab at playing in the style of the day – and it succeeds on a number of levels – including a 17-minute plus prog opus that I really enjoy, complete with almost ambient creepy organ break and tony banks-style warped organ sound at the beginning, entitled “resolution” – not to be missed.

there are four songs, six tracks: three takes of the first piece, “propulsion”, each of which has improvements and alterations over the previous one, we are clearly trying to work out the piece – and by take three (which interestingly, is twice as long as take 1 or 2 – they are about 3 minutes plus each, while take 3 runs a full seven and a half minutes), it has taken a pretty decent form; then there are three unique tracks: “revolution” – which has a kind of heavy guitar bit in it that I quite like, it’s a nice little jam – followed by the remaining two pieces…

“resolution” is the aforementioned super-long prog rock extravaganza, and for my money, it’s the most interesting thing here musically. it begins with something planned, and then the rest is just made up – but that start – I have something really detuned going on (despite the absence of a whammy bar, somehow I do this) while ted is turning the power of the hammond off and on to get this weird, warped sound (and what a sound it is!!) that hammmonds famously make when you shut them off and on while playing – and it sounds amazing, a totally beautiful effect from the organ and guitar, and rick is furiously playing something akin to freestyle jazz on the drums, which gradually resolves into a rock beat – so the song starts like a staggering drunk man, who gradually gets up and starts to walk a nearly straight line. I can say without reserve that this is probably the best single “beginning” of a song that I’ve ever been involved in, I remember cooking it up with ted, and it just worked phenomenally well – excellent work.

I think it’s remarkable to realise that, the beginning of this song was “planned” literally seconds before we did it, we would discuss the upcoming piece just prior to starting it, and I can remember this surreal conversation – “let’s start this one out really strangely and then move into the piece…” – and that is exactly what we did! but then – how did it evolve into a more than seventeen minute long prog masterpiece? that was not planned – but, we just kept playing.

it then transforms from that strange, detuned beginning into a really nice long jam – with lots and lots and LOTS of guitar solos and organ solos, and a beautiful “quiet” section from ted too, that I really like – just a nice piece of work, considering that only the beginning is planned, and the next 16 minutes are totally conjured up out of nothing, on the spot, by the band!

to close the set, the final piece “evolution”, is quite unique in that it was built to a strange concept that I came up with: I could see that the cassette was nearly full, with just a few minutes left, so I said “ok guys, let’s play in E major just as FAST as we possibly can” – so we start off at a furious pace, and indeed, play until (and beyond, no doubt) the tape runs out – and we manage, somehow, to keep that relentless pace (I can audibly hear rick struggling to keep the drum beat going at this tempo!) up for a full three minutes – a really nice way to end the set I think.

so much more music is appearing that I find that I don’t have time to document it all, however, suffice to say that I did four different recording sessions today, that went something like this: five experiments involving running soundprism pro from the sono 88; eight tracks working with the itabla pro application and one or more application synths playing along with it; nine tracks involving the korg electribe drum machine (this thing is genius!) and various other synth apps; and finally, ten tracks made using “pinkie” – the original korg kaossilator. That was a good day of recording, and I look forward to hearing some of this material back…especially the kaossilator session, which was completely unplanned, and an enormous amount of fun – what a brilliant device!!!

I learned a lot about just how much you can get away with in layering synth apps and drum apps when triggering from the 88 key keyboard, and I think that among all that was recorded today, that there will be a number of releasable items – I am sure of it.

dave stafford on you tube

you tube channel ablackboxHD
featuring the work of dave stafford – his “anything goes” channel – this is the channel for covers, piano songs, original pop songs, vocal works – “everything else” from dave stafford